Phonics

Phonics is taught thoughout our Trust using 'Letters and Sounds' which is a systematic Phonics Teaching resource. This is taught in carefully planned and structured phonic lessons that take place daily throughout KS1.

Letters and Sounds is made up of 6 phases. These are expected to be taught during the following years: Nursery/Pre-school - Phase 1, Reception- Phases 2, 3, and 4, Year 1- Phases 5, Year 2- Phase 6.

Phase One – Activities are divided into 7 aspects including environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body sounds, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and finally children are introduced to oral blending and segmenting.

Phase Two- Children learn 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. They begin to blend sounds to make words and segment words into separate sounds.

Phase Three – Children learn the remaining 7 letters of the alphabet with one sound for each. They also learn some digraphs (two letters that make one sound e.g. ch, sh) and some trigraphs (three letters that make one sound e.g. igh, air).

Phase Four – No new grapheme-phoneme correspondences are taught in this phase. Children learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants, e.g. stop, spin, jump.

Phase Five - Children learn more graphemes for the phonemes which they already know, plus different ways of pronouncing the graphemes they already know.

Phase Six- Children continue to work on their spelling, including prefixes and suffixes, doubling and dropping letters

Throughout the phases the children are gradually taught ‘tricky’ words, these are words that do not follow the phonic rules, e.g. was, people.

How can parents help at home?

Teach your child nursery rhymes.

Read to your child regularly, even once they become readers themselves.

Ensure that you hear your child read regularly, ideally every day. Encourage them to use their phonics to decode unknown words.

Encourage your child to sound out words as they write.

There are some really good websites with phonics games to reinforce their phonic knowledge.